Cousin Blood Lion

8pm 2/24/14

At my corner.

The weather doesn't fit the visual, the visual being unsnow.

The visual doesn’t match (it’s cold and windy and 30 degrees) the expectation. This is disheartening. Expecting one thing, getting another, that whole ho hum thing.

Like when the young child learns that her crush on an older cousin is wrong.

Or, as an adult, expecting to get X amount of work done, yet by the end of the day you haven’t touched half of half your intentions.

Or, expecting it to be a normal old Monday: library trance from 9am to 6pm, but it just ain’t so. Or maybe it is so, it’s just that the trance is a different trance, one you weren't expecting.

***

Today my cousin passed away. He was/is 32.

My heart is heavy. So is my head. And body, and this hand trying to write. Everything wants to rest.

***

Why am I here? A few years ago, I once told a friend who was considering an MFA, that the whole thing was self-indulgent.

Today I agree with myself.

***

Disheartening.

Diss heart-ning.

Dissed heart strings.

Dis heart hurting

Dis heart smears itself

Lightening bug

On a distant

disconnected

Blog.

Blah.

!

***

I am nobody

Who are you?

Are you nobody too?

***

The ink in my pen is frost bit, it’s not working with me, not recording what I want it to.

But then, I lift my notebook to the street light, and see that it was writing the whole time.

***

The yellow rectangle of my office floats above me. From where I sit three silhouette trees braid themselves in a conspiring thread to block my view. I am having trouble seeing much of anything, I huff to myself in Eeyor fashion.

 My brain says move, so I do. I come to a new angle and can see into my window, see the pieces of furniture that I imagined were there a few seconds ago in their visual absence. So I see the familiar, see what I expected and a mocking happiness washes over me. My confirmation of what I knew was already there seems so pathetic. Expectancy encourages a change of view I hear my body getting all preachy on me, but I’m in no mood. Expect nothing.

***

My leafs

Look at them holding on

                                         Look how they become “my” leafs when

 I personify them with strength

My leafs

My needs. To connect

I am connected to these “my” leafs (now your leafs)

What they hold on to, is the same thing they must leave

Leafs leaves or don’ts leaves,

Thank you girls for making your own

time thieves

Look how my leafs become “shes”

My she leafs

Our she we leafs

***

It’s a mixture of things—my sadness, the night, the cold air, my readings from earlier in the day—that allow me, right now, to allow nature to work its magic on me.

Tom Grimes said that it is not identity searching which makes us writers (this intrigued me. Weren’t the odd lot of us MFA’ers here precisely for this reason? To consider ourselves for an intensive two years? To study the ways in which we thought or didn’t think?), but something that precedes the quest of identity.

Check this out:

“Maybe what I wanted all along was what Tolstoy and Hemingway seem to have, which turns out, upon close reading, not to be identity, but negative capability, that mysterious Keatsian ability and desire to swim through confusion, and without  anxiously or irritably grasping after facts (those tempting transcendent things), keep themselves afloat…what I was really searching for was not identity, but mystery, reflection, doubt, a constant state of never knowing who I am, always testing, always weighing, always evolving.”

***

Self indulging? Depends on what day you ask me.

Confusing?

Absolutely, but perfectly so.

***

Cousin

Blood

Lion